Spring 2026 ETC Community Achievements

Each semester, we celebrate the creative, technical, and collaborative milestones of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center’s (ETC) students, alumni, and faculty. From published research and public premieres to game launches and international recognition, Spring 2026 has been full of ETC moments worth spotlighting:

Student Achievements

José Mireles Macario Presents At Events, Interviewed

José Mireles Macario (ETC 2026) presented at both the Latino Graduate Student Association Panel and CMU Scholar to Scholar Graduate Project Showcase. Macario was also interviewed for the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs’s Graduate Student Spotlight, where Macario talked about his experiences at the ETC and the three CAVERN experiences he’s developed in his time here.

Samantha Lai Awarded Grant For Work With Vivian Shen

Samantha Lai (ETC 2026) received a CS+X Grant from CMU’s Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry for her research with Assistant Teaching Professor Vivian Shen. The grant, which aims to catalyze innovation through collaborative projects involving advanced computation technologies with a focus on novel and creative applications, supported Lai and Shen’s project exploring the correlation between viewer attention states and narrative engagement in interactive experiences. This summer, Lai and Shen’s project will be on display in SIGGRAPH’s Immersive Pavilion.

Faculty Achievements

Ralph Vituccio Premieres “In Exile” Internationally

Teaching Professor Ralph Vituccio premiered his feature documentary “In Exile” internationally in Canada at the International Migration Film Festival and in Sweden at the Oslo International Film Festival. The film brings together powerful stories of artists, writers, and activists who’ve been forced to flee their countries, exploring themes of resilience, cultural memory, and creative resistance.

Vivian Shen’s “Kinethreads” Wins At Laval Virtual

Assistant Teaching Professor Vivian Shen’s Kinethreads won in the XR Devices and Interactions Products category at the Laval Virtual Awards. Working in collaboration with Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) Associate Professor Chris Harrison as part of HCII’s Future Interfaces Group, Kinethreads is a design for an affordable and lightweight full-body haptic exosuit capable of rendering expressive, distributed, and forceful effects.

Chris Klug’s “James Bond 007” Inducted Into ENNIE Awards Hall of Fame

ETC Teaching Professor Chris Klug’s 1983 tabletop RPG “James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty’s Secret Service” was inducted into the ENNIE Awards Hall of Fame. The ENNIES, a fan-based celebration of excellence in tabletop roleplaying gaming, wrote that Klug’s game is “a shining example of genre emulation done right, and its legacy continues to influence espionage games across the industry.”

Jesse Schell To Speak At Games For Change Festival

Distinguished Professor of the Practice Jesse Schell has been announced as a featured speaker at the 2026 Games for Change Festival. The Festival, which will take place from July 21-22 in New York, is themed this year around “Reimagining Play.”

Vivian Shen Plays In Inaugural Ultimate Frisbee Game

Assistant Teaching Professor Vivian Shen also played in Pittsburgh's first ever professional women’s ultimate frisbee game on May 16th. For the past three years, she’s been a part of the Pittsburgh Port Authority team competing in the USA Ultimate Mixed Division.

Heather Kelley Presents At International Conferences

Assistant Teaching Professor Heather Kelley will present this summer at two conferences in Copenhagen and Ireland. At Playing Futures in Copenhagen, Kelley will give a talk about the interactive installation Grow Still she created at the ETC in collaboration with visiting artist Marie Claire Leblanc Flanagan in 2023. At DiGRA 2026 in Ireland, she will teach a workshop on level design alongside USC Professor Richard Lemarchand.

Jessica Hammer Publishes Paper in Nature

ETC Associate Professor and Center for Transformational Play (CTP) Director Jessica Hammer and CTP Ph.D. student Rotem Guttman’s paper, “Design Tools for Gateway Interface Ecosystems: A Socio-Ecological Approach”, was accepted for publication by SN Computer Science.

Schell Games Named Top Workplace

Schell Games, the Pittsburgh-based game studio founded and run by Distinguished Professor of the Practice Jesse Schell, was named a top Pennsylvania workplace in USA Today’s 2026 list of Top Workplaces.

Project Successes

Team TACIT Showcased at Laval Virtual

Fall 2025 project team TACIT showcased their work at Laval Virtual 2026 in Paris, France. Laval Virtual is Europe’s XR event, and the team was able to travel there in-person through support from the ETC and from the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs. Their project — an experimental inquiry into vibrotactile haptics and VR using the Meta Quest 3 and bHaptics TactGlove DK2 — has participants quite literally hold a heart in their hands, demonstrating the emotional and narrative possibilities of sensory technologies.

BVW Experience Featured At International VR Festival

“Cosmos Echo,” an immersive VR experience created by a team of first-year ETC students in this year’s Building Virtual Worlds course, has been selected for this year’s Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS). Directed by Jiaxin He, the team included Jessica Li, Frank Lin, Na Chen, and KX Shuai. The 5-minute experience puts players in the role of a dying astronaut adrift in space and in his memories.